Day 4 of our stay in Shanghai - we were greeted in Huzhou yesterday by an audience of music undergraduate students who had awaited our arrival in the performance hall for over 45 minutes. When we stepped in the side door they burst into applause - what a welcome! We were hurried to the backstage area to unpack and get ready to perform - immediately! The lower strings, of course, had not touched an instrument since leaving Seattle and had to navigate the different fingerboards with no opportunity to noodle around. The orchestra played splendidly. Afterward, three of the university music students performed for us on the erhu (Chinese 2 string violin), an instrument resembling a dulcimer (whose name I forget) and piano. They said later they were so nervous because they had never performed for Americans. But their music was so expressive, warm and virtuosic, you never would have known. For a 10 AM concert, the erhu player was dressed in gold lame! After the music was finished, we stayed for photos - many, many photos, as seemingly all Chinese now have digital cameras and want to pose with Americans, usually making a peace sign with their fingers, although one young man had fashioned a small "anti-CNN" flag and posed with Ben, holding it proudly across his chest with a Chinese flag in the other hand.
After lunch, Peter bought 3 pineapples (for about $2.50 US) and Robert Y bought an length of black sugar cane taller than him that the woman shopkeeper adroitly shaved with a serious looking cleaver. The students all noshed on it while we took a stroll along the canal.
This is a traditional canal neighborhood of one-story residences, a barber shop and tiny businesses. It would not be featured in any guidebook. We saw an outdoor hibachi-like cookstove going and a man being shaved with a straight razor. Every now and then, instead of a house there would be a pile of rubble. Our guide from the university explained that all these houses would be torn down in the near future and replaced with new ones, thereby providing a more modern, comfortable and hygienic living quarters for the residents. But, as he said, they would lose "something Chinese" along the way. It's sad, but the issues around modernization are so complex, as we're learning on this trip, that it is not possible to say that it's a bad thing. Our guide said that next time we came to China we would no longer see this neighborhood.
Our host, Mr. Zhu, was so concerned that we had been rained upon during the stroll (which hadn't been on the official itinerary) that he phoned ahead to our kitchen staff to have hot, sweet ginger "tea" awaiting us upon our return. Can you imagine such a luxury in Seattle?
Today we'll see the Shanghai Conservatory and later tai chi and the acrobats.
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Hello! I'm reading this marvelous blog to follow the travels of my dear young friend, Trevor Harron. I just want to thank you for your entries -- you are a beautiful writer, and I LOVE the close-up details, like the man being shaved, like the rubble and propect of the little houses being torn down, like the sugar cane being pared down. This is the stuff of travelogue writing that is hard to put down! Well done! And huge greetings to Trevor from me, Caity Gerhardt
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